Here’s a video clip from my lecture last October at Neumann University on the Uncanny Valley. About an hour into the discussion of why androids and animatronics might creep us out, I gave this overview of “terror management theory” to explore how it applies to theories of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) and the representations of robots and androids in popular culture. This moment was followed by an analysis of various short videos, and a discussion of the film, Ex Machina — you can see the sources I drew from and some photos from the event on an earlier post on this blog.

Had a GREAT time in Philadelphia this past weekend, where I attended DogCon4 and delivered an address to Neumann University on “The Uncanny Valley.” MANY THANKS to Neumann University for supporting my trip, Dr. Bill Hamilton for inviting/hosting/handling, Dave Bullis for running the media, and of course, all my friends at Raw Dog Screaming Press for integrating this lecture into their literary convention. It was great to meet everyone, and to see old friends throughout the weekend (from students I met during my last visit to speak at Neumann to buddies in gold morphsuits and Seton Hill alums).

If you missed this talk, my next one on the subject will take place at a PARSEC gathering in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie Library (Squirrel Hill) on Dec 12th at 1:30pm. DETAILS.

I will be giving a talk about “The Uncanny Valley”, free and open to the public, at Neumann University (near Philadelphia, PA) on the early evening of Oct 23rd. This event doubles as an early bird festivity for Raw Dog Screaming Press’ exciting conference, DogCon4. [Raw Dog is the parent company for Guide Dog Books, who is slated to publish The Popular Uncanny later this Fall/Winter.]

This is a return of the uncanny to Neumann, where I gave an invited lecture on “The Popular Uncanny” back in 2012. To get the flavor, you can watch that lecture on youtube:

The latest print issue of Wired magazine (Sept 2015) includes a mini-feature story on “The New Cultural Literacy 2016,” which includes the above entry on the ubiquity of the uncanny valley in technological design. The phrase “Uncanny Valley” has indeed become so ubiquitous in discourse that it seems to be drummed up whenever anything is “creepy” or horrifying in gaming, robotics, automation and computer imaging. The concept of the “uncanny valley,” described briefly in the magazine by Clive Thompson, is that “when you make animated humans look too realistic, they suddenly seem creepy — like zombies.” He’s summarizing the well-known theory of Masahiro Mori, and though he frames it as something out of Hollywood (the most common example is the creepy representation of Tom Hanks’ character in The Polar Express) it is a concept that has its roots in android science. I have discussed the Uncanny Valley theory regularly on this blog.

This deceptively small recognition by Wired has all the feeling of a watershed moment to me — it is a conscious acknowledgment of the ubiquity of the catchphrase “the uncanny valley.” But it’s the headline of this news byte that I want to briefly talk about out: “Everything is Uncanny” and the subhead “Stop it technology, you’re creeping us out.” [Note that the website version of the article puts it differently: “Technology is Really Starting to Creep Us Out”]

Let’s start with the latter cry to tech (“Stop it…”), which is voicing something a lot of people have likely thought privately, while at the same time caging the response as cheeky or flirty or humorous. But what makes it effective, more than merely a clever cry for an end to the “creepiness,” is that the line is framed as if speaking to “technology,” as if AI, robots, computers could all, en masse, respond to the request. This is inherent to the uncanny in general: a sense of life where there is none, animation where there is the inanimate, the plastic or the dead, motion where there should be stillness (“stop it!”). This “living dead” or “conscious non-entity” conceit is not just the rhetorical “apostrophe” nor the stuff of literature and the movies or even robotics. When the market on Wall St. seems to move on its own accord, for instance, we say things like it is having a “Bull Run,” or that it is a “Bear Market” — in other words, that it is like an animal with its own conscious will, often a will that moves against human wishes and desires. Ergo, it is creepy: we are not in control of what we thought we were, and the world is no longer obedient to what we think of as “natural” law.

Thus, technology “creeps us out.” Out of what? “Out of our comfort zone,” is the general sense of it. A zone where we were ostensibly masters of our domain, prior to the uncanny experience.

Now, to the headline itself: EVERYTHING IS UNCANNY.

Note that it does not say “The Uncanny is Everywhere.” The uncanny is not a place, but rather a feeling of displacement. It is an affective response, like boredom or joy — a feeling of “creepiness” in response to a stimulus that is therefore called “uncanny.” This is precisely why “everything” (and “thing” is the perfect term) CAN be uncanny. Because anything can trigger the emotion that things are not as they should be — that familiar has been made strange (e.g. “unheimlich” — unhomelike). We can always nominalize an adjective and promote it to a higher significance than it might otherwise have, generalizing a personal feeling into a universal phenomenon.

But to creep is also move along the fringes of perception, to slowly sneak up on the paranoid mind, to quietly escalate in power and threat. Technology has become so ubiquitous that it is a part of “everything” — and has snuck up on us, escalating in a power that seems autonomous. So even if Artificial Intelligence has not taken over the world with a mind all its own in some kind of science-fictional dystopia, at the same time it is everywhere and omnipresent, as though someone other than us is responsible. Everything is uncanny.

Google NGram chart shows the resurgence of the word “uncanny” to currently match its high point in 1928.

One can’t help but see the two high points of the term — cresting in 1928 and almost at the very same point in 2008 (though I suspect the chart would be at an all time high if it reflected today’s rate in 2015). What does this tell us? What speculations can we make about this?

Well, as much as it might mean nothing whatsoever, the chart does make us wonder about correlations. And perhaps it does provide some indication of the circulation of the term in common parlance, which is pertinent to my study of the popular uncanny.

I would suggest that the term is a meme that circulates more frequently during times when a culture is unconsciously registering a “return of the repressed.” In other words, it’s reasonable to argue that the chart above points to times over the century when writers were grappling with a feeling of unease, deja vu or strange familiarity — since they were using the term to describe this phenomena more or less often in their writing. One could point to cultural tensions like, say, World Wars or economic recessions and depressions and suggest these are historically linked to such anxiety. But for the time being, I am looking at this chart and considering how it reflects the term’s usage as a critical apparatus. If we label the chart with a few of the key publications related to the phenomenology of the Uncanny, we can see their relationship to these trends fairly easily:

A few key texts in Uncanny theory.

It seems fairly clear to me that Freud’s touchstone essay on “Das Unheimlich,” published in 1919 (responding to Jentsch’s 1906 essay on the topic) was as much a product of its time as it was a contributor to it. I want to speculate that Freud’s discussion of the term as a critical concept as much as a word to describe a feeling led to coining the term as a “buzz” word, as well. So it makes sense that the word would rise in popularity for the decade or so following the publication of “Das Unheimlich,” reaching its high point in usage in the period between 1920 and 1940 — even if this was not necessarily Freud’s most notable article during the period (which may have been”Beyond the Pleasure Principle” — with its uncanny-related concepts of the Death Drive and “repetition compulsion” as it related to war veterans). Of course, Freud alone does not have ownership of the term. I believe popular/pulp fiction also contributed to its popularity during this period, with “uncanny” tales being labeled as such. And as the term becomes more familiar, more domesticated, more marketed, it begins to fall out of fashion.

So what brings us to the “second wave”? Anneleen Masschelein, in her book The Unconcept, has quite excellently accounted for the “canonization” of the term Uncanny by the “uncanny critics” of literary psychoanalysis in the 1980s and 90s — a historical argument that certainly is supported by this second wave of the uncanny in the NGram chart. Masschelein specifically points to 1970 as a turning point, when deconstructionists like Derrida, Todorov and Cixous were writing about the concept in relation to psychoanalysis and literature, at the same time as Lacanian critics were discussing the concept in their journals, producing a watershed of criticism among deconstructionists like J. Hillis Miller, Jonathan Culler and others who employed the term in their writing. Thus, the surge evident in the chart between 1980 and 2000 really echoes the rise of the term in literary and cultural theory, as much as popular parlance.

Although not a party to such matters, Masahiro Mori’s concept of “the uncanny valley,” notably, was ALSO first published in this “turning point” year of 1970 (which ironically falls in the “valley” of this chart). But it was not really until a 2005 conference on Robotics that Mori’s famous phrase began circulating broadly in works by those interested in robot and android science, leading to the second high point of 2008, with no sign of decline, given its popular appearance in circles across the internet today, when popular culture has picked up on the phrase and we now see it more commoonly in gaming circles, in Science Fiction, in art theses, and even on TV shows like 30 Rock. Here’s a close up on the more-specific phrase, “uncanny valley,” as it has circulated since Mori’s publication of the concept in 1970, showing not only the rise in 2005 related to the robotics conference, but a definite leap in the years following 2005 up leading toward the unchartable figures that no doubt are even higher today.

The English circulation of the phrase ‘Uncanny Valley’ since Mori’s first publication of the theory in 1970.

In some ways this ascent of “uncanny valley” may soon be the dominant understanding of the uncanny, replacing the unheimlich of Freud and the deconstructionists, though Mori is certainly in some ways informed by Freud, even if the phrase subordinates (or represses?) his original theory.

And though all of this charting and speculation is somewhat frivolous, in reflecting on these matters, I’m reminded of Freud’s etymological discussion of the terminology for the uncanny itself, and how in part one of his essay, he argues that the term “heimlich” (familiar) over time evolved into the “unheimlich” (strange) — leading to his great line about how “the un- is the token of repression.” So for kicks, I thought I’d pop both these words into Google’s NGram chart using German books to see how they compared:

Familiar and Strange: the terms converge in 1900 and begin to follow a “double” pattern of usage thereafter.

To my amazement: the terms unheimlich and heimlich almost converge in 1900 and set into a pattern that — dare I say it — “eerily” follows a parallel moevement thereafter, like an uncanny double. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

On the Uncanny . . .

[The Uncanny] is undoubtedly related to what is frightening — to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general.